The Pope said that indigenous people should have the final say about what happens to their land.

Pope Francis insisted on Wednesday that indigenous groups must give prior consent to any economic activity affecting their ancestral lands.

The pontiff met with representatives of indigenous peoples attending a UN agricultural meeting and said the key issue facing them is how to reconcile the right to economic development with protecting their cultures and territories.

“In this regard, the right to prior and informed consent should always prevail,” he said. “Only then is it possible to guarantee peaceful cooperation between governing authorities and indigenous peoples, overcoming confrontation and conflict.”

History’s first Latin American Pope has been a consistent backer of indigenous rights and has frequently spoken out about the plight of indigenous people in resisting economic development that threatens their lands.

“For governments, this means recognizing that indigenous communities are a part of the population to be appreciated and consulted, and whose full participation should be promoted at the local and national level,” Francis told the indigenous leaders Wednesday.

If the post-Vatican II mess puts an end to Pius XII’s idiotic “right to immigrate” I guess it won’t have been all bad (just almost all bad).

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Of course, the issue lies in the definition of “indigenous peoples” — if you look at the Wikipedia articles on various indigenous groups, and the UN definitions of the term, it’s obvious that it’s a definition that is specifically made to exclude Europeans. Rather than referring to any historically native population, it refers to only those that have been affected by (usually European) colonialism.

Whites can’t be indigenous. When they live in more or less that same place for generations, we call them xenophobic racists. When they decide to move from this place, we call them colonialists. Indigenous people are completely different. When they decide to move from their homeland, we call them dreamers.

Once in a while, over the years, in the wilds of the Amazon or in Panama’s jungles, you get a bunch of indigenous peoples who get slaughtered with modern semi-automatic rifles. From what I can tell, as I follow this stories online, this is the result of either a drug deal gone bad (I’m assuming the Indians were couriers), or, possibly ranchers trying to take over the lands of the slash-and-burn indigenous peoples. Just an observation.

“As millions of refugees without any home or place to go, wandered all over the Europe, Pius XII insisted that immigration is a natural right and duty. In 1946, he declared, that all people have a right to immigration, because the Creator himself demands access to material goods. In addition, compassion supports immigration rights. Conversely, no state which can support additional people, has a right to close its immigration doors without reason.”

There you have it. As long as your country can feed one more person at above-starvation level, you have a duty to prostrate yourself before the Muslim invasion. Even before Vatican II, the Church had taken her disregard for the collective rights of peoples to insane levels.

“As long as your country can feed one more person at above-starvation level, you have a duty to prostrate yourself before the Muslim invasion.”

This is an implausible interpretation of Ven. Pius XII’s words. Here is the relevant passage according to the translation linked to by ArkansasReactionary:

“The Creator of the universe has provided all His good gifts primarily for the good of all; consequently the sovereignty of individual states, however much this is to be respected, ought not to be carried so far that free access to the earth’s bounty, which is everywhere adequate to support multitudes of human beings, should be denied to needy but worthy persons who have been born elsewhere, and this for reasons altogether insufficient and unjust, especially when such free access will not be detrimental to the public welfare properly weighed and considered.”

This is much better than the translation in the Wikipedia article. Based on the official Latin text in the AAS, an even more literal translation would be as follows:

“… that, even though the earth is everywhere adequate to support many, for altogether insufficient and unjust reasons access should be denied to needy persons who have been born elsewhere and are possessed of good morals, whenever this will not be detrimental to the public welfare properly weighed and considered.”

Instead of an “above-starvation level,” Pius was probably thinking of the notion of a “living wage” or “just wage,” which is what Catholic social teaching emphasizes. So it seems a country has to admit immigrants under the follwing conditions:

1) They cannot obtain a living wage in their countries of origin.
2) Their host country is able to provide living wages both to them and to its existing population.
3) They are “possessed of good morals.”
4) Their presence is not “detrimental to the public welfare” of their host country.

The presence of a significant number of Muslims is clearly “detrimental to the public welfare” of any non-Islamic country, not only because of terrorism, but also because of non-violent ways of spreading Islam, including higher birth rates. Moreover, many of the Muslim settlers currently swamping Europe are by no means “possessed of good morals.”

The above quote by Pius XII doesn’t deny that a high degree of cultural, religious, ethnic or racial homogeneity can be part of the “public welfare.” Catholic social teaching promotes “solidarity” as one of its main principles and as the social expression of Christian charity. But excessively diverse societies tend to fracture into subgroups which lack solidarity among each other; therefore, a sufficiently high degree of homogeneity seems to be recommended by Catholic social teaching.

The Church also teaches that, others things being equal, a government must care more for its own citizens than for foreigners. Cf. the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“The most complete realization of the common good is found in those political communities which defend and promote the good of their citizens and of intermediate groups without forgetting the universal good of the entire human family.” (#409)

I am not sure how HH squares his welcoming of immigrants to Europe (to feed the EU economy with labour in at least some measure), to consulting the indigenous populations regarding ancestral lands usage. It would seem that he wants to be on both sides of European populism?